If Friday the 13th finds you being a little more careful than usual, you’re likely one of the millions of Americans who consider themselves to be at least a little superstitious.

The Freeman School’s Eric Hamerman says people are more likely to turn to superstition to help achieve performance goals as opposed to learning goals.

A. B. Freeman School of Business researcher Eric Hamerman studies the impact of superstition on decision-making and his latest paper sheds light on the situations in which individuals use superstitions most.

People are more likely to turn to superstition when they’re interested in achieving a performance goal as opposed to a learning goal, he said.

“Performance goals involve somebody else giving me approval whereas learning goals involve an internal sense of competence and mastery,” said Hamerman, an assistant professor of marketing at the Freeman School. “Only when looking for outside approval do we bring in outside sources, such as luck, to try to help ourselves.”

An example of a performance goal would be a musician who practices in order to receive applause. If the musician were to practice solely for the satisfaction of mastering the piece of music, that would be a learning goal. Similarly, a student who studies to get an A has a performance goal whereas a student who studies to learn the material has a learning goal.

While Hamerman’s research doesn’t address whether belief in superstition affects one’s performance, he said focusing on performance goals tends to make people feel less in control while focusing on learning goals tends to make people challenge and stretch themselves.

“The lesson here is that we should really try to reframe those performance goals as learning goals,” Hamerman said. “If we focus on the process rather than the outcome … we’ll tend to focus on more rational solutions to become better achievers.”

Hamerman’s paper “Reliance on Luck: Identifying Which Achievement Goals Elicit Superstitious Behavior,” co-authored with Carey Morewedge, appears in the March 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

And while such superstitions can be broken, says Dr. Johar, it often takes a lot of negative evidence before people are willing to part with their lucky rituals. That’s because they “provide some sort of a hedge against uncertainty,” says Eric Hamerman, an assistant professor of marketing at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business who, with Dr. Johar, co-wrote the study, published in October in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Eric Hamerman’s paper “Conditioned Superstition: Desire for Control and Consumer Brand Preferences,” co-authored with Gita Johar, professor of business at Columbia University, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research. The paper explores the notion of conditioned superstition, the idiosyncratic superstitions people form through everyday associations between a product and an outcome. The authors find that people are more likely to engage in superstitious behavior when they have a high level of desire to control an uncertain outcome combined with a low perception of their ability to do so. Furthermore, Hamerman and Johar find that after engaging in superstitious behaviors, individuals are more likely to predict a successful outcome. Hamerman is an assistant professor of marketing at the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.

On a recent Friday morning, about a dozen undergraduate students gathered in a computer lab in the business school where they were directed to a website and asked to make various choices—everything from what to order for dessert to whether to go to a restaurant advertising a special to which NFL replica jersey to buy.

It may sound like an online shopping session, but in fact the students were participating in behavioral experiments designed to help researchers at the Freeman School better understand the complexities of consumer decision-making processes.

The Freeman School’s Behavioral Lab hosts dozens of such experiments each semester. Located on the first floor of Goldring/Woldenberg Hall, the lab features 24 specially configured computer terminals that enable business school faculty to administer surveys, conduct experiments and collect the kind behavioral research data that eventually ends up in peer-reviewed journals. In a very real sense, the Behavioral Lab is where the science of consumer psychology begins.

“This lab is very similar to what you have in psychology departments in the sense that there are professors who do behavioral experimentation,” says Eric Hamerman, assistant professor of marketing, who administers the lab for the Freeman School’s marketing faculty.

Recent topics investigated in the lab include social media and its effect on purchase behavior, the effect of mood on consumer variety-seeking, alliteration in advertising, multitasking and purchase behavior, and the impact of the moral behavior of celebrities on product endorsements.

More than 300 students in TIDES and core marketing courses participate in studies each semester in exchange for class credit. While students may not be right for every study, Hamerman says they’re generally ideal for consumer behavior research.

“Are Tulane students representative of everybody in the country? Probably not. But are they consumers? Absolutely. If you’re studying human behavior and making choices, they’re a fine population.”